An interesting fact about our home...

You are never more than 5 paces from a 5x magnifier jeweller's loupe.

There are a million things you'll want one for so there's one in every room - at least one. You can stack them to increase the magnification so sometimes they are found in clusters too.

Dinner conversation -

Dark Mirror - "Hey did I tell you what happened when I came home from Labrynth?"

Me - "No, what?"

Dark Mirror - "A wolf spider swung down right in front of my face as I was opening the door to come in!"

Nature Girl - "There's one hunting at the back door too, didn't you hear me screaming earlier?"

Me - "Nature Girl, you scream a lot. Well there's another one on the window here in the diningroom." gesturing to window behind my head.

Papa Pan - "I put them there as guard dogs, Mica only guards Sprout's high chair"

Nature Girl - Is that one on the OUTSIDE of the window?"

Me - "Yup let me get a loupe, where is it?"

Nature Girl - "I put it in my basket"

1, 2, 3 paces

Nature Girl looked at it, Dark Mirror balked, remembering how he developed an intense fear of Ladybugs after looking at one with a loupe before, but Nature Girl convinced him because Wolf Spiders are "cute". Dark Mirror looked at it and agreed it was cute AND gross cause it was eating something. Wild Thing was all impressed with the hairs on its legs.

We finished dinner discussing Spider facts...like did you know all spiders have 8 eyes, but jumping spiders have 4 in front and 4 in the back of their heads? I do now.

That is why we have loupes everywhere.


and spiders.

How can people hate playstands?

Because for some reason, just about every photo of them online shows them as ridiculously expensive shelves for natural toys rather than being played with.

http://www.make-baby-stuff.com/playroom-decor.html

I hate those canopy arches a lot of them have now. Why? Because unless the children are old enough to pull them off themselves they SERIOUSLY inhibit play. I feel the same way about multi shelf units...okay one of them is fine. But I REALLY hate seeing them used as shelves!

Playstands were not designed to tidily delineate a small play space or create a little room. They were designed to help children meet their need to build on a large scale, to create their imaginative landscape in full form...without pirates commandeering the couch cushions, the dining room table, etc. If I didn't mind the kids standing on the diningroom table with spyglasses in hand I wouldn't bother having the playstands. Ours spend as much time as ships and buses and trains as they do a store, a house, a cave.

So I'm making a solemn vow. To protect the honour of the playstand I will NEVER post a picture of our playroom when I've tidied up and the pirates and trolls and mermaids...errr *children* have gone off to bed.

Sci Fi Pills and Prayer Meetings

"What's in that syringe?" Sprout asked me

"A Rapid Dissolve Proton Pump Inhibitor." I answered

"Cool!" Sprout exclaimed and sucked it up.

It's reflux, and there's no need to do any invasive tests unless he keeps on losing weight. He's going to take Prevacid - the Proton Pump Inhibitor - until the vomitting is under control, probably by age 2. It won't stop the vomitting, not at all! But it will help him sleep by reducing the acidity of what comes up his wee throat. Yesterday he vomitted 8 times, not bad!

Nature Girl had a sleepover with her friend the Rock Hound. I came down to find them huddled round the dehumidifier (?) discussing religion. They were sharing prayer practices.

Afterwards I asked Rock Hound about it.

"Hey RH I didn't know you were Buddhist!"

"Yeah! I just decided I was"

"Cool, how did you come to this decision?"

"Well, I believe in peace and reincarnation, and we found these prayers online. I think I'll become a vegetarian too."

His mom is an atheist...I wonder how she'll take the news that he discovered religion at our house, while I let them - unsupervised (a 15 yr old doesn't really count) - play on the computer after dinner.

So, fair warning: You never know what evil lurks out there on the internet!

Rainbow Haven Beach - Eastern Passage

The Sprout and me.

Photographic evidence that Dark Mirror is capable of both a day on the beach and getting a little bit wet.

Wild Thing ought to be in pictures...

This is Papa Pan's beach; as in, he grew up directly across the road from it. There used to be a camp here for underprivileged city kids. Growing up, Papa Pan always wondered how come he didn't get to go to camp, cause he was really poor too! Now he knows what a blessing growing up on this beach was.

Nature Girl was on a playdate with a friend, she spent the day climbing trees and exploring an entirely different beach. We ended our day with Fish and Chips at John's Lunch and came home with a huge tub of clams. Nature Girl had pizza and came home with clam shells.

Bow and Arrows

When the stress of life is getting you down, go bond with a 4 year old over weaponry.

Wild Thing is quite the archer! Papa Pan is quite the artisan with a kitchen knife, nature walk and ball of twine.

Life is happening too far away from the blogosphere to post much...

Dark Mirror is an amazing photographer...WHO KNEW! Anyhow he's returned to Nature Boy status after several years hunkered over the computer...this is Baxter's Harbour...

Nature Girl at Cape Split...

The whole family at Kingsport Beach

I'm back in body...

but my spirit is kind of scattered about the ether right now.

Chiron East was wow, amazing, enlightening, deepening, nourishing, all great and wonderful stuff and Inwill post a whole lot more in a few days time.

While I was dropping the kids off in Ottawa (which went really well at the airport) Sprout and I crashed the Fringe Festival blogger wine and cheese with Zoom ... Greenpa, has competition I have a new crush - Milan from a Sibilant Intake of Breathe. Sprout got rowdy and threw brie and strawberries.

I spent an afternoon with Dark Mirror, and had my heart stomped on when I went to pick him up - poor Nature Girl and Wild Thing were down with a stomach flu bug and Wild Thing fell apart when I had to leave him there.

Went to Chiron and got some sage advice on being the pillar of strength I need to be for my littles during this sort of developmentally inappropriate separation.

Came home, called the kids and my sunny, strong, independant Nature Girl broke down sobbing that she wanted me to pick her up!

I spoke with Dark Mirror and told him I was afraid to talk to Wild Thing in case I upset him even more.

What do you think, should I be calling once a week or not? Will it mae it harder on them, or am I making excuses for how hard it is on me?

I'm exhausted, of to bed and tomorrow I'll clean and maybe blog but definitely take pictures of all the flowers that came out since I left!

Guilty as charged...

This poem was written by Brianne McPhearson, 7th grader at Shining Mountain Waldorf School.


Waldorf Moms
Waldorf moms wear cotton socks
Woolen sweaters, Birkenstocks.
Waldorf moms have long full skirts,
Big silk scarves and layered shirts.
Waldorf moms have fluffy hair,
They’re kind and firm and make you share.
Waldorf moms drive Volvo cars
And talk of fairies, gnomes, and stars.
Waldorf moms love Waldorf meetings
Where they greet with Waldorf greetings.
Waldorf moms make Waldorf dolls
From purest wool and cotton balls.
Waldorf moms drink lots of tea
Which has been grown organically.
Waldorf moms serve fruits and meats.
Veggies, grains, and not much sweets.
Their favorite word is “nourishing.”
They love to hike and knit and sing.
They leave the gluten out of bread
And make you spend twelve hours in bed.
And if you fall and scrape your knee
They give you rescue remedy!

Never fail play dough recipe

1 cup flour
1 cup beet cooking water, spinach cooking water, or onion skin cooking water...or water
1/2 cup salt
2 tsp cream of tartar
2 tbsp cooking oil - I usually use grapeseed oil

If you want to get fancy add a few drops of essential oil when you knead it

Put in a pot on the stove on medium
Stir constantly til it thickens
Let it cool til you can handle it
Knead

Stores really well in a closed container.

This is a lovely soft playdough, just right for first dough experiences with little ones, it doesn't dry out quickly, it doesn't dry out little hands, and it isn't gritty like a lot of homemade doughs. We love this dough.

Takes less than 10 minutes to make.




But it doesn't taste good!

Waldorf on a Shoestring - the early years

People think Waldorf homeschooling, or enrichment, or raising kids "the Waldorf Way" is expensive. I know its a combination of things - the private school tuition, volvo driving, organic fashion, crunchy upper middle class older mom image that goes along with who chooses Waldorf Education when they have a choice about these things, but lets take it back to the bare bones.

The first school was for the children of the Waldorf cigarette factory workers. Urban shift workers, not rich folks.

So, first things first - The Waldorf Kindergarten ages 4-7. It didn't originally exist! The Kindergarten mimics the healthy rhythm of the home, so all you need to do is focus your attention on a healthy home life and include your children in that. What is a healthy home life? Okay that really isn't something that can be glossed over quickly so I'll come back to it, but a healthy home life doesn't involve a curriculum or any expensive paraphenalia.

You want details though!

Oh, okay. What do you need to get started, to undertand the philosophy? I'd recommend you go to the library and get out Rahima Baldwin Dancy's book "You Are Your Child's First Teacher" and then if you feel you need more help establishing some simple traditions with verses and stories and simple ideas for new traditions get out Shea Darian's book "Seven Times the Sun" I think this book is the greatest example of "How to Do Waldorf Early Childhood". Thats it.

Now, about those waldorf toys you're supposed to have. Stop worrying about it.

A basic list of natural playthings:

earth
mud
ice
snow
rain
tides
shells
seaweed
driftwood
beach glass
leaves
stems
flowers
seed pods
branches
nuts
berries
husks
stumps
sand
pebbles
rocks
boulders
sunshine
shade
sunsets

With all of that available in their natural environment how many toys can they possibly need?

I'd like to put forth the thought that if you didn't provide any toys, and your child was never exposed to advertising for toys, that they would seek out 10 basic playthings.

a doll
a ball
blocks
some way to play kitchen
things to help them build a shelter of their own
a small scale dollhouse of some kind
a farm of some kind
dressups
a nature collection
art making materials

As I've written about before, they'll create all of these things on their own if you don't provide them. They really will. But if you want to provide these toys please consider making them yourself with your child. You don't need to buy any of them.

Over the next month I'll try to post tutorials for each of them.

In the meantime - the most simple rag doll YOU make from recycled materials will be far better than the most expensive handcrafted waldorf doll you could ever purchase.

But today I'm going to post about the thing people seem to choke on - the art supplies. In Waldorf education, children are given artist quality art materials and there's some sticker shock when you face a box of 8 crayons that cost 12.00 or more. Three things to understand, the box of 8 block crayons you buy your child now, will be the same box of block crayons they use their entire childhood. I'm totally serious. They don't break, and they last forever, well atleast a very long long time - my kids are using crayons I bought 10 years ago still. Once in awhile you can sit down with some vegetable oil and a piece of rag or paper towel and clean them. I do it once a year. The stick crayons you'll want eventually, and in a wider range of colours don't break either (unless you work at it and there are some valid reasons to make them smaller!) and you'll eventually need to replace specific well used colours. You can buy them *individually* as needed though. The second thing to understand is that rather than buying 64 fashion colours of crayons, most blended with white to make pastel tints, you have an artist's spectrum of colours that allow your child to blend the colours they want, they even sell "blenders" if you want to get fancy. The third thing to understand is that you don't NEED beeswax crayons to incorporate the Waldorf philosophy into your home or homeschool! You can use whatever crayons you have available to you right now!

The same applies to the watercolour paints. There are all sorts of great reasons to get child safe artist quality watercolour concentrates, but you don't need them, any watercolours will do.

Same thing with the modelling wax. Now, modelling wax is kind of a specific material and no one else really makes it for kids so here's a simple recipe for making your own. This isn't exact, because beeswax comes in several different grades from soft and flexible to kind of flaky and crumbly

Lets say a cup of beeswax

2 tbsps olive oil

2 tsp lanolin

In a double boiler or a can in a pot of water melt your beeswax

Mix the lanolin and the olive oil together and add to the beeswax til its melted - remove from heat and keep stirring and pour into a walled cookie tray you have lined with tinfoil. Let it cool until you can tear it into quarter sized pieces. Let these cool completely. Take a piece and warm it in your hand and roll it into a ball, then press it out flat, umm this more of a pulling it out flat, and fold it. Can you do this without it flaking? Can you do this without it crumbling? Is it too hard to do it at all?

If it feels "good" its ready. If it is flaking apart or crumbling then you need to add a bit more wax. If its too hard to work, add more oil or lanolin.

If you want coloured modelling wax melt crayon shavings in with small batches of your quarter sized pieces and pour out to recool.

If this seems like a lot of work - homemade playdough is fine too!

If you want to make a petroleum free version of plastercine it is easy too, and you'll use it in the upper grades.

WEAR A DUST MASK FOR THIS!

1 cup of modelling wax

2 cups vegetable oil (olive is good because it doesn't go bad easily)

2 tsp lavender essential oil

3 cups powdered clay from the beach, the yard, or the health food store (it needs to be DRY or it'll get funky. So if you collect your own, crumble it up and put it in a PAPER bag to dry, then pound it up in a mortar and pestle (this is a fabulous thing to get the kids to do for you btw!) )

Melt down your wax, add the oil, and slowly add the clay to the mix, stirring well. Take it off the heat once all the clay is combined, not before, and pour it out on a cookie sheet to cool. Then, treating clay like flour, knead it til its all well mixed up and again, feels "right". With this one, you can always knead in more clay, but it won't melt up easily to start over with k?

So there you go, add a bread recipe and start gardening and you've got birth to seven covered!

We seriously considered naming Dark Mirror "Calvin" before he was born...

Fabulous quotes on "schooling"

I collect these, some of them, like Einstein's are well known, others in this list are relatively new to me. I'm particularly interested in what educators have to say - like Charlotte Mason who championed a curriculum that was both classical in nature and full of time out of doors exploring nature, everything else was in short bursts of time so children had time to run about engaged in LIVING during the day. She really understood the need for a balanced head, heart, and hands lifestyle.


"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." Albert Einstein

"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."George Bernard Shaw

"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."Henry David Thoreau

"The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you." John Updike (who has taught in an exclusive private school for years btw - even teachers hate the institution of the "school" !)

"I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be." Albert Einstein

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."Ivan Illich

"There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school" George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize winner)

"Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities." Seymour Papert

"Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest."Charlotte Mason

"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." Grace Llewellyn

"the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."- Noam Chomsky

What I will never understand is how people who believe these same sentiments would still force their children to attend school when they had the ability and resources to provide alternatives. Surviving the system doesn't enrich anyone's life, it just feeds bitterness and resentment. Of course maybe that is their goal, who knows?

For old time's sake...

There was a time when Dark Mirror was a total Nature Boy. I have many a smiling picture of him catching frogs, jumping streams, sitting at camp fires, and hiking, like in this photo.

This was something special we shared alone, or with the kids' Oma. Oma took this photo and it is one of my favorites.

Wild Thing has taken to wearing that same head band and carrying his own compass (though he often combines it with a toilet paper roll to turn it into a gun).

She creates a world as she knows it...

This is Mother Nature's daughter. The trees are from her feet and the roots grow from under her toes. Her skirt is made of dirt. Her shirt is made of leaves. She has green eyes, and green lips. Her hair is green as you can see. The trees start as sprouts but they grow HUGE in a second.

Obsessions are a Geek Thing

I’m a firm believer that we learn the most from doing what we love. Information sticks like glue when it is tied to skills you have a practical use for. This applies to any interest, whether we see it as traditionally valuable or not.

Dark Mirror has spent several years obsessed with Starcraft, a computer game. The interesting thing is, he’s only marginally interested in playing Starcraft. He is much more into designing the game himself. So, he’s been introduced to the idea of computer programming through it. He reads about it, authorized stories about the game characters, as well as fan fiction. He translates other fantasy and science fiction stories into the mechanics of the game as well. He writes about it. He looks at world geography and translates it into Starcraft maps. He draws characters and maps constantly. He even explores pretty complex math concepts through it; like, if our math system is a base ten system because we have 10 digits on our hands, what happens in an alien culture where they have eight digits? Ever tried doing math in a base eight system? Dark Mirror has, just for fun.

As a mom, the best thing about Dark Mirror’s Starcraft obsession is that he’s sought out an online community of others with the same interests. He spends a lot of time working cooperatively with other fans on games and in discussions on game mechanics and more geeky philosophical topics. This group has become real friends to him when he’s needed to talk about more weighty issues in his life too. That’s great for an introvert. I’ve noticed that the trust he’s developed in this online group of faceless internet friends has translated into an openness in the real world too, and Dark Mirror is having a much easier time making friends, and talking about things other than Starcraft.